


Learning How Not to Die Inside a Little Every Time I Think of You

by sequence_fairy



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), Watcher Entertainment RPF
Genre: Angst, Grief, M/M, Mourning, Possibly Unrequited Love, Shit's not happy fam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:26:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25415389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sequence_fairy/pseuds/sequence_fairy
Summary: “You’d have picked out an entire sentence from that,” Shane says to the spirit box. “And I’d have laughed at you and told you it was nonsense. And then—”Shane closes his eyes because this is the part he hates remembering the most.Shut up, Shane.Shane hates the spirit box, but it's all he's got left.
Relationships: Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej
Comments: 47
Kudos: 164





	Learning How Not to Die Inside a Little Every Time I Think of You

**Author's Note:**

> Okay well, this started out as vent fic like, six weeks ago and now it's fic-fic because I don't seem to be able to finish anything else. Sorry, not sorry. 
> 
> Thanks to [Aly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathtaken/pseuds/breathtaken) and [Mel](http://justcourbeau.tumblr.com) for help with taking this from what it was to what it is, to the coven for yelling at me, and to the discord for allowing me to ruin everyone's Monday night. Also thanks very much to The National, without whom I would write far less fic.
> 
> Inspired by that post that was floating around tumblr that I cannot find even tho I am sure I reblogged it. If anyone has it, let me know?

_Alone in the quiet light_  
_I'm always thinking you're behind me_  
_And I turn around and you're always there_

* * *

Shane hates the spirit box. 

He has  _ always _ hated the spirit box. 

That he has it in his hands now does not mean that his feelings about it have changed. He still hates the fucking thing. He hates the record-scratch screech of it turning on and the squawk of the frequency before it settles into its usual shifting search pattern. He hates the way it feels to sit here, with cold stone at his back and the stars overhead, alone, with the fucking spirit box. 

Hates that he hopes tonight might be the night that changes everything.

It’s stupid, what he’s doing. Nothing’s gonna happen. But he can’t seem to do anything else, so sitting here at three am instead of lying in his bed, staring at the ceiling, like he does for the rest of the night seems at least moderately productive. Not that anyone’s holding him accountable for his productivity, or the lack thereof, lately.

The light breeze trips through the ends of his hair and sneaks down under the collar of his jacket. Shane shivers. It’s cold. Well, maybe it’s not. Shane doesn’t know. He hasn’t thought about the weather in weeks. 

Thank God it hasn’t rained since. 

Shane’s not sure he could go out in the rain. He is glad he hasn’t had to try yet. 

He tilts his head back against the granite, while the spirit box goes  _ chh-chh-chh _ on and on beside him. He reaches up to pull the collar of his coat together. He’s cold. Even if the weather isn’t. Even if Los Angeles is warming into summer. He’s been cold since the phone call and the hours and hours of waiting that followed it. Since the second phone call and the empty space of time after it.

He’s glad, almost, that there were other people to shoulder the burden of the immediate aftermath. Not that he wishes that on anyone or their family, but he’s glad not to have had to do that part of it. It was easier to wait by the phone, until the sky went from black to grey and dawn crept into his kitchen. Until the phone rang and shattered the silence and the news on the other end of the line broke everything else.

Shane thinks he got through making himself another cup of coffee, because he came back to himself with a mostly full cup at his elbow, but otherwise, he’s remained unable to account for the stretch of time after he’d hung up with Ryan’s younger brother. His phone screen is cracked now, like it had slipped from nerveless fingers at the news, and Shane’s sure it did. 

He hasn’t had it replaced, even though it’s been months. He looks down at it, thumbs his screen awake, looks at the way the expanding crack running diagonally from the top left corner crosses through the middle of his lockscreen. There’s something in that, something about the way his life has splintered into sharp pieces that only hold together because they are in tension with each other, and how, now, that the cracks are growing, the tension is starting to fail. Shane lets his empty lockscreen go back to the blank face of his phone going to sleep. 

The spirit box hisses and spits out some inarticulate noise that might be music, but it skips past the frequency too fast for Shane to really know. He’d never really learned how to interpret it, just complained about it to Ryan and ignored every piece of ‘evidence’ Ryan said it had given them. A couple of times, the sounds coming out of it had been coincidentally spooky, but it was never compelling enough. 

The spirit box goes back to the rush of static, and Shane goes back to thinking about that first night. 

He remembers staring at the clock over his stove, remembers the way he’d sat at his kitchen table, not moving, for the whole day. He’d thought, maybe, that it was all a joke, a cruel ruse cooked up for a bit of fun, but as the hours wore by, and no laughing voices appeared at his door, camera in hand, Shane had come to the realisation that his life was now clearly delineated into three parts: Before Ryan, Ryan, and After Ryan.

Sara had come over that night. Shane remembers that. He remembers her hands in his hair, remembers the hitch of her voice as she’d pulled him into her arms when he’d finally mustered the energy to get up and let her into his apartment. She’d held him in the doorway, and then they’d shuffled inside and somehow, ended up on the floor in front of the couch. 

Steven had come by the next day, pale and drawn and gun-shy in a way that Shane knows Steven hasn’t been for years. The three of them had sat on the couch, Sara and Steven bracketing Shane, and the silence had descended as the sun had set outside. 

They’d gotten blisteringly drunk after that. Shane’s stomach twists unhappily at the memory.

There’s usually one moment of clarity in the run up to the blackout, and Shane’s is this: 

Sitting on the floor, Sara on one side of him and Steven on the other. Sara’d been holding Shane’s hand, and Shane had been talking, in a low voice, spilling all the aching things he’d been carrying, giving them to someone else to hold. He’d been telling Sara, because he’d forgotten Steven was there, about how Ryan was the sun he turned towards. How Shane had always looked for him in the dark, and wondering what he was supposed to do now that the sun had gone out. 

Steven’s voice is clear in Shane’s mind now, even though at the time it had been muddled with drink and shot-through with grief. “He told me once that he used to catch himself looking for you, whenever you weren’t around. I caught him not too long ago, eyes sliding to his left, to make sure the joke was landing. You weren’t there. I don’t think he realised he was doing it.” 

Shane tilts his head back. Well. He’s still doing it. He’s still looking for Ryan every time he opens his mouth and remembering anew each time that Ryan’s not there. It’s like a punch to the sternum every time. Shane had hoped it would feel less like that over time, but so far it has not lessened.

“This is the dumbest thing I have ever done,” Shane says to the no-one that is listening. His voice is scratchy, disused. He doesn’t talk too much anymore. It’s hard to talk when the person you used to talk to isn’t there to talk back. 

Oh, Shane has other people to talk to, sure. Every one of them has been talking to him. So much. 

Every time someone else says they’re sorry, it makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He feels like he’s walking around with his shoulders hunched up around his ears. He probably is. There’s an ache in his spine. Possibly it’s his body trying to manifest a physical ache to go with the rest of the pain. Shane doesn’t care to interrogate it. So far, his body still carries him from place to place, even if he doesn’t really want to go to any of them.

It’s exhausting to go to work, exhausting to stay home—no one ever tells you how tiring mourning is. He supposes he’s lucky that this is the first time he’s ever had to do this. That he’s never before had to bury someone he—well, someone he cared for. Someone who might’ve been family, by one definition or another. 

The spirit box keeps skipping through frequencies, silent except for the hiss of the radio band. 

“Even you would laugh at me for this,” Shane says. 

No chance of any hauntings here in a graveyard. Spirits are tied to places of importance to them. Ryan had explained that over and over, and for all that Ryan thought he wasn’t listening, Shane always was. They’re tied to places they spent time while they were alive, and Ryan never spent any time in this cemetery, not that Shane knows of, when he was alive. Shane can’t do this at the office though, can’t sit in the dark at their desk and wait for the spirit box to do the nothing it was always going to do. So he has to do it here. 

“It’s been really hard,” Shane says. It feels like the understatement of the century. Everything has been herculean. 

His therapist keeps telling him that’s normal. That grief is a weight that you learn to live with, and that eventually it’ll get easier. Shane knows she knows what she’s talking about, seeing as how she’s the professional and he is not, but it still feels like she couldn’t possibly understand. He doesn’t talk much in their sessions lately. She keeps asking him questions, trying to draw him out, but Shane’s been having trouble with the whole using his mouth to make words thing. 

The stars above his head are mostly hidden by the ever-present light pollution. There’s a bank of clouds coming in from the west, the edge limned in the orange glow of the sprawl of Los Angeles. 

Shane could just leave, he supposes. No one would fault him for it, he’s sure. They’d all be just as understanding about this as they had been about his refusal to speak at the funeral, about his inability to do more than stand there, struck dumb.

He should have spoken, he knows. He should have gotten up there in the suit he bought for the Streamys and has now worn to bury his best friend, and told everyone how much Ryan was loved, how much Ryan meant to everyone around him, how much he was the sun that Shane turned toward in the darkness. It was too much at the time. Walking behind Jake down the centre aisle, his shoulder and back aching from the strain of the heavy wood, had been all that he could manage, and even then, after the service and the internment, Shane hadn’t been able to face the quiet gathering at the Bergara house. 

He’d taken a Lyft miles into the other side of LA and spent hours walking home, eyes focused on his shoes. He’d had blisters on his heels and an ache in his knees when he’d finally arrived at the intersection down the block from his building. He’d wanted to keep going, wanted to turn left and head out towards the hills, but he’d headed home instead, because he’d been the only one left. He’d also wanted to turn right, and walk until he found the street Ryan lived on, and saw the shuttered windows and the closed door and the empty driveway. 

Shane still hasn’t even driven by. 

He feels unmoored. He feels adrift. Who is he without Ryan at his heels? It’s been too long since he’s had to be Shane-without-Ryan. He’s not sure he can remember how to do it. He could lean on any of the people around him. He could talk to Sara, he could talk to Steven, he could talk to Ryan’s brother, or his own parents. But he feels like they’re all handling their own grief, and why should they handle his too? 

There’s a skip of noise in the rolling frequencies, then a burst of chatter. Shane knows it’s nothing, but it doesn’t stop him from looking down at the little black box with its dials and knobs and hoping that it’ll happen again. He stares, unblinking, at the device sitting next to him, willing it to do anything at all. It skips again, and voices filter through, but it’s all garbled noise. 

“You’d have picked out an entire sentence from that,” Shane says to the spirit box. “And I’d have laughed at you and told you it was nonsense. And then—” 

Shane closes his eyes because this is the part he hates remembering the most. 

The tone of it is going now, no matter how hard he’s tried to fix it into his mind. He could find it in half a dozen places online, he’s sure, but his memory of it is always coloured with the way Ryan would roll his eyes, and that fond exasperation that never quite translated through the mic.

_ Shut up, Shane _ .

Shane’s memories are sharp except for where they’re not. Some of them he’s shying away from in a way that makes him worry that they’ll disappear, but he’s not ready yet to look at them again. There’s one night in particular that Shane can’t touch, won’t touch, refuses to think about in his waking hours. 

He’s woken up to the dream of it so many times since, though. 

Sometimes it’s a nightmare, making him shake into wakefulness with a ragged gasp. Sometimes it’s something else entirely; an extrapolation of what might’ve happened if either of them had been braver at the time. Shane’s always been a coward, but he’d hoped, maybe, that Ryan would have been brave enough for this too. Those dreams, Shane decides, are much worse than the nightmares because they leave him aching for something he can no longer imagine having.

He’d waited too long. Thinking he had the time to lose. He shouldn’t have waited, should’ve pushed and said something and then, maybe, Ryan wouldn’t have been heading home alone with Shane headed in the other direction. The rain that night had been incredible. Shane’s Lyft driver had said he’d never seen anything like it, and Shane had stared, unseeing, out at the city sliding by in sheets of sluicing water. 

He’d give a lot of things to do that night differently. To make different decisions. To have the foresight to choose another path. To make Ryan come home with him. To go home with Ryan. To spend another hour at the bar, pitching each other increasingly ridiculous show ideas until they were both in tears. There’s no guarantee that it would change the ultimate outcome, but maybe he’d have an extra hour of memories. 

Maybe he’d have gone instead and it would be Ryan sitting out here at the witching hour waiting for nothing to happen. Maybe they’d have gone together. Shane exhales, shuddering. He’s not the kind of person to spend a lot of time contemplating his own mortality, especially in the context of actively doing something about it, but lately it seems like the fragility of life is on display everywhere he turns.

“I’m so mad at you,” Shane says, eventually. He swallows against the lump in his throat. “I’m furious at myself, but I am so,  _ so _ angry with you. You were supposed to be here. I can’t—” Shane cuts himself off. He presses his closed fist to his mouth, inhaling raggedly. He blinks against the burn in the backs of his eyes. 

The spirit box says nothing. Shane doesn’t expect it to. He scrubs a hand across his face, before shoving it back through his hair and then letting it fall beside him again, grass cool against his skin.

“They want me to decide about Unsolved. Steven will want to figure out what to do about your stake in Watcher. I’m not ready.” 

Shane sucks in a breath. Would he have ever been ready? Probably not. They were meant to do this together. To get old and grey and dumb together. Sure, Shane had also wanted other things, but he knows he’d have been happy to just be Ryan’s friend. To see him find a partner who loved him, to watch him bloom into the man he’s been trying to be for the entire time Shane had known him. It’s like a light’s been snuffed out.

“I don’t feel like I should make the call on Unsolved, but I know I can’t do it without you. Not the way we used to. There’s no point in talking to myself about things I don’t believe in,” Shane says. “It was always you I believed in the most, anyway.” 

Shane’s surprised himself recently, with his willingness to believe in something. To believe in anything. It’s amazing what trauma will do to you. He’s been grasping at the faith he’d been forced into having as a child, spending long hours with himself trying to make sense of this and Ryan’s steadfast belief that everything happens for a reason. He keeps trying and failing to make sense of the waste of this. 

It is a waste. It’s a damn waste. That’s what everyone keeps saying. 

When the announcement had gone out on their social media channels, Shane had thought he would be prepared for the outpouring. Instead, it was the most overwhelming thing he’d ever experienced. He’d turned off his phone after watching the notifications pile up for five minutes and crawled into bed at ten in the morning. He hadn’t managed to get back out until Scott was at his door, voice raised to be heard through the fire-grade steel. 

It had been nearly two days.

Scott had taken one look at him, and pulled Shane into a hug. The kind of bone-cracking hug that they didn’t do. The kind that took your breath away, and Shane had hugged his brother back just as hard. Scott had stayed the rest of the week, had made sure Shane ate and slept and sat with him and let Shane exist in the bubble of acute loss. 

Shane had sent him home on the weekend, and Scott had looked down, making sure to catch Shane’s eyes. “You’ll call me,” he’d said, and Shane had nodded. So now, he calls Scott every night, and they talk, quietly, about nothing. 

“It’s weird,” Shane says, after the spirit box goes back to doing its usual  _ chh-chh-chh _ . “I thought maybe it would be me, you know? I guess I just assumed it’d be you out here, waiting for me to haunt you so that you could tell me ‘I told you so’ and laugh in my face. Except it’s not me. It’s you.” Shane reaches up and pushes a hand through his hair. “I’m not sure if I’m doing okay or not doing okay.” 

Shane’s watch beeps. He’s been here for long enough. He doesn’t want to get up, and his knees protest as he does, but he forces himself up to standing, scooping up the spirit box as he goes. He turns it off with a click, and the sudden silence feels deafening. He looks down at the dark stone, eyes tracing the letters, and rests his empty hand on the top for a long moment. 

Shane turns away from the marker and heads back out towards the path. He shoves the spirit box into his coat pocket. He gets almost all the way back to the imposing wrought iron gate before his steps falter, and he slows. 

A breeze ripples through the trees planted along the path, their leaves rustle against each other.

Shane hunches his shoulders further into his jacket. Around him, the city is its usual hum of very late-night or very early-morning activity. The far off wail of a siren makes Shane’s heart turn over in his chest. The spirit box feels heavy in his pocket, and Shane’s hand curls around the little device without thinking. 

He takes a breath, lets it fill his lungs and then exhales slowly and completely. 

It doesn’t matter if he goes back to the marker, doesn’t matter if he sits there ‘til the sun comes up or until he turns to dust himself, nothing is going to come through the spirit box. Shane knows this. He believes it with every fibre of his being. His feet want to go back nevertheless. Kinetic energy coils in his thighs, waiting to be expended from potential to movement. 

Shane stays rooted to the spot, unmoving. He curls his toes in his shoes and looks out over the rows of markers and the shadowed lawn. 

Ryan isn’t here. He isn’t. Nothing of Ryan remains, not in the box buried under six feet of fertile topsoil. That’s just a shell, an empty husk, the vessel that once contained Ryan in all his ridiculous humour and doe-eyed sincerity. Shane’s hand curls around the spirit box, fist tightening until he can feel the edges digging into his skin. 

No matter how much he wants Ryan to be here, no matter how much else there is to say, no matter how many times he turns that night over in the back of his mind, nothing will change the final outcome. 

In a flurry of movement, Shane takes the spirit box out of his pocket and raises his arm. He hates this thing. Hates it. Hates it.  _ Hates _ it. He wants to see it shattered, into a million little pieces, too small to be put back together again, too small to be recognizable. He’s suddenly breathless, panting like he’s run six miles in the hot Los Angeles sun, and his jaw is clenched around whatever is trying to come out of his mouth because Jesus, he will _ not _ . 

Shane’s chest heaves and his arm shakes. He can feel the subtle give in the plastic casing of the little radio that says he’s holding it too tightly. 

Too tight like the thing that’s been wrapped around his spine since so much longer than that night. Too tight like the way  _ that _ smile of Ryan’s had made his chest feel, too tight like the grip he’d had on Ryan when Ryan had slipped on those stone steps. Too tight like the way Ryan had held onto him after a particularly harrowing night in the desert. 

If he holds it any tighter, he’s going to break it. 

Something awful and painfully sharp lodges in his chest, making his breath catch. His knees wobble, then hold. He swallows. His arm lowers. His grip loosens until instead of holding the box, he’s cradling it in his palm. It’s so small, such an innocuous thing. Something so tenuous in its connection to the greater world, and its brief sojourn as a tool looking for something more. 

Shane puts the spirit box back in his pocket and turns back towards his car. 

As he passes through the gate, there’s a shimmer of something in the corner of his eye. 

Another car drives past the cemetery wall, slow and careful, and then its headlights turn to the red glow of tail lights, and Shane watches it go.

**Author's Note:**

> Come chat with me about my fic on [tumblr](http://sequencefairy.tumblr.com) or on [twitter](https://twitter.com/warpspeed_chic). <3


End file.
